Sony RX1 Gallery shots posted!

Dave Etchells is out in San Francisco shooting with the amazing full-frame 24.3-megapixel Sony Cyber-shot RX1 and we've managed to post a few of his Gallery images. He's having a great time with the Sony RX1: "It's an absolute joy to shoot with. I can't believe how compact it is for a full-frame digital camera," he said.

The Sony RX1 is the first full-frame digital camera in such a small form factor. To achieve its small size, Sony limited the design to a single-focal-length, non-interchangeable 35mm f/2.0 lens. The result is an amazing camera that takes full-frame images, but occupies about as much space as the smaller mirrorless cameras.

Later tonight or tomorrow Dave will be posting a few more images, so stay tuned! Meanwhile, check out our Sony RX1 Gallery!

A note from Dave: I used Sony's DRO (Dynamic Range Optimizer) pretty freely on these shots, especially the ones after dark. It does a great job of controlling contrast by bringing up the shadows, making the night shots in particular much more appealing and visually representative of what the original scene looked like to the human eye. Because it boosts brightness in the shadows, though, it boosts noise there as well, so noise in darker areas of many of these images will be higher than might have been if they were shot conventionally. Even at that, the noise isn't at all bad in my estimation, but I wanted to point out that DRO had in fact been applied in many cases. (Also, of course, these were shot with a prototype RX-1, so image quality on final production samples could conceivably be better as well. Given how well it performed, though, I'll be surprised if images from the full-production versions look much different.)

Another note: Shawn mentioned my reaction to its size above, but it just doesn't do it justice. This thing is compact. I'll try to get a shot tomorrow of it next to the NEX-6, time and equipment availability permitting: Believe it or not, it's actually a bit smaller than that model, even though it's a full-frame, as compared to the NEX-6's APS-C sensor. Given what I've experienced shooting with it, and what I'm seeing in its photos, I think it's worth every penny of its retail price if you're a photographer into the compact rangefinder-style street photography aesthetic. It's just an amazing piece of kit...